Congressman Ellison on How to Counter Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the US

 

“We know that the real question is not whether there is anti-Muslim hate, we know there is. The real question is what are we going to do about it?”

 

He called for Muslim Americans to become more engaged in politics and create a substantial voting block “to ward off” people like Republican Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. “There is not much of a political cost to insulting Muslims on the airwaves today,” he explained.

 

The Congressman also urged the entire community, not just Muslim Americans, to become more involved in ending the discrimination. “We are in a tug of war,” he said. “Trump and Cruz are trying to mainstream bigotry, and we are trying to marginalize it...We've got to get the whole community to say that this is not acceptable," he emphasized.

 

Specifically, he pointed to two types of discrimination against the Muslim American community: “individual” discrimination, including the spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes, as well as “official” discrimination that is carried out by our government itself, such as anti-Muslim profiling at airports, spying on Muslims, etc.

 

“If you look at the federal and state government’s efforts to address extremist violence, it is overwhelmingly focused on Muslims, not focused on the people who are actually generating the bulk of the violence,” he maintained.

 

To address official discrimination, the Congressman is writing to the Justice Department to change these practices and he also suggests adjusting the approach of the government’s Countering Violent Extremism efforts.

 

In order to counter private discrimination, “leaders in the community sending social messages is incredibly important,” Congressman Ellison said. For example, he recently teamed up with local leaders to run a bipartisan ad campaign in his home state. The ad’s message was that "It'd be UN-Minnesotan" to “be silent or still in the face of bigotry shown to Muslims.”

 

Just as other minority communities have historically achieved success in politics, Congressman Ellison believes the Muslim community will too: “As long as people continue to mobilize, organize, communicate,” he concluded, “I believe the future is bright."

 

He also pointed to the need for more research and scholarship about Islam in the American context, such as Muslim voting, gender equity, and Islamic history in the US: “It is enormously important that we have the Abbasi program here at Stanford, and I hope we make maximum use of it because there is a lot of opportunity here and there is a very strong nexus between the idea generation and the policy.”

 

Watch the video on YouTube or listen to an exclusive interview with Congressman Ellison via the Abbasi program’s Kaleidoscope podcast.